journal of jesuit studies 3 (2016) 42-60 brill.com/jjs Suppressed Emotions: The Heroic Tristia of Portuguese (ex-)Jesuit, Emanuel de Azevedo1 Yasmin Haskell University of Western Australia [email protected] Abstract This article is a pilot for a larger project on the emotions of the suppression of the Society of Jesus, viewed through the prism of Latin writings by Jesuits of the period. It proposes a case study of Portuguese (ex-)Jesuit, Emanuel de Azevedo, who lived and suffered internal exile in Italy (from Rome to the Veneto) in the second half of the eighteenth century. Azevedo composed a large quantity of Latin verse during these unhappy years, from a four-book epic poem on the return of the Jesuits expelled from the American colonies to a twelve-book description of the city of Venice. The main focus here is Azevedo’s collection of Latin verse epistles, Epistolae ad heroas (Venice, 1781), loosely modeled on Ovid. Azevedo writes Latin verse both to temper his own sadness about the suppression and to console Spanish, Portuguese, and American con- frères living in exile in the Papal States and in Russia under Catherine the Great. Keywords suppression of the Society of Jesus – Emanuel de Azevedo – history of emotions – neo-Latin poetry – Ovid – Jesuit education – New World – consolation – Giulio Cesare Cordara – Catherine the Great * A version of this paper was presented at the first international symposium at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, Boston College, 10–14 June 2015, on Jesuit distinctiveness. My thanks to the Institute team, especially Robert A. Maryks, Maureen Novak, and Claude Pavur, for their kind invitation and warm hospitality. © Haskell, 2016 | DOI: 10.1163/22141332-00301003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 4.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:20:20PM via free access <UN> Suppressed Emotions 43 During waves of expulsion from Portugal, France, Spain, and their overseas territories, from 1759 through to the suppression of the Old Society by Pope Clement xiv in 1773, Jesuits were exposed to intensifying ridicule of their religious positions, their way of proceeding at home and abroad, and even of their enviable educational system. For the two centuries leading up to the suppression, the Society of Jesus had contributed conspicuously to European science, art, music, literature, and theatre. Along with the order, the Latin humanist education that had prevailed in Europe since the Renaissance took a serious body blow in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Jesuits had been the target of satire and opprobrium from their inception, of course, and not exclusively in Protestant countries, but the avalanche of anti-Jesuitica that gathered momentum over the second half of the eighteenth century was unprecedented.1 In French pamphlets of the period, Jesuits were portrayed as conspirators and regicides (later, ironically, counter-revolutionaries), profiteering hypocrites, devil-worshippers and corrupt- ers of youth, who get their comeuppance falling off towers, passing through sieves of true piety, and tumbling to hell to be welcomed by demons. More sympathetic engravings show groups of humiliated, distraught, sometimes frail and elderly, priests, assembling at ports before embarking for exile.2 While there has been an efflorescence of historical studies of the suppres- sion in recent years, especially from national and/or colonial perspectives,3 1 Sabina Pavone, The Wily Jesuits and the Monita Secreta: The Forged Secret Instructions of the Jesuits: Myth and Reality, trans. John P. Murphy, S.J. (Saint Louis, mo: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005); Christine Vogel, Der Untergang der Gesellschaft Jesu als europäisches Medienereignis (1758–1773): Publizistische Debatten im Spannungsfeld von Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2006). 2 See Rolf Reichardt, “L’imaginaire social des jésuites bannis et expulsés (1758–1773): Aux origines de la polarization idéologique entre Lumières et anti-Lumières,” in Los jesuitas espa- ñoles expulsos. Su imagen y su contribución al saber sobre el mundo hispánico en la Europa del siglo xviii, eds. Manfred Tietz and Dietrich Briesemeister (Madrid-Frankfurt am Main: Universidad Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2001), 473–525; Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Catherine Maire, eds., Les antijésuites. Discours, figures et lieux de l’antijésuitisme à l’époque moderne (Rennes: Presses Universitaire de Rennes, 2010). 3 In addition to Tietz and Briesemeister, Los jesuitas españoles expulsos, the older studies of Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, Los jesuitas quiteños del extrañamiento. Introducción, selección y traduc- ciones latinas e italianas (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2010 [Puebla: Cajica, 1960]), and Miguel Batllori, La cultura hispano-italiana de los jesuitas expulsos: espa- ñoles, hispanoamericanos, filipinos, 1767–1814 (Madrid: Gredos, 1966), see Antonio Trampus, I gesuiti e l’Illuminismo. Politica e religione in Austria e nell’europa centrale (1773–1798) (Florence: Olschki, 2000); Enrique Giménez López, ed., Y en tercero perecerán. Gloria, caída y exilio de los jesuitas españoles en el s. xviii (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2002); Niccolò Guasti, L’esilio italiano dei gesuiti spagnoli: Identità, controllo sociale, e pratiche culturali 1767–1798 journal of jesuit studies 3 (2016) 42-60 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:20:20PM via free access <UN> 44 Haskell there has been relatively little work devoted systematically and synoptically to the emotional impact on Jesuits living through these turbulent times, and to how they managed, individually and collectively, their changing religious identities, schol- arly careers, and mental health.4 In the larger team project of which this paper represents a tentative first step, we hope to consider the twilight of the Old Society of Jesus through a unique and highly revealing prism: that of the Jesuits’ literary production, especially in Latin, over the period leading up to, during, and immedi- ately after the suppression.5 Via a series of case studies of Jesuit writers anticipating or living through the long era of the suppression, mainly in Italy, but also in Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe, we aim to build up a much more compre- hensive picture than hitherto available of their literary works and networks, and of the emotional freight these conveyed in different times and places. Scarcely the tip of the mountain of Jesuit Latin writing that survives from this period has been explored, which is perhaps symptomatic of a lingering prejudice against later neo-Latin writing tout court.6 Yet neo-Latin writings are rich sources for historians of emotion, and Jesuit neo-Latin writings for histori- ans of the emotions of the suppression. Not only could Latin be the vehicle for articulating sincere and complex emotions, belying the frequent association of “epilinguistic” idioms with cerebrality, impersonality, and stereotypicality, but, (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2006); Antonio Astorgano Abajo, La literatura de los jesuitas vascos expulsos (1767–1815) (Madrid: Delegación en Corte, Departamento de Publicaciones, 2009); José Antonio Ferrer Benimeli, Expulsión y extinción de los jesuitas (1759–1773) (Bilbao: Mensajero, 2013); Ugo Baldini and Gian Paolo Brizzi, eds., La presenza in Italia dei gesuiti iberici espulsi. Aspetti religiosi, politici, culturali (Bologna: clueb, 2010); Sabina Pavone, Una strana alleanza. La Compagnia di Gesù in Russia dal 1772 al 1820 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2010); Maurice Whitehead, English Jesuit Education. Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762– 1803 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Robert A. Maryks and Jonathan Wright, eds., Jesuit Survival and Restoration. A Global History (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Jeffrey Burson and Jonathan Wright, eds., The Jesuit Expulsion: Causes, Events, and Consequences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 4 See María Susana Cipoletti, “Fruto de melancolía, restos del naufragio: el Alto Amazonas en los escritos de los jesuitas expulsos,” in Jesuitas españoles expulsos, 237–64; Martin Morales, “Riflessioni su un corpo malinconico. Esempi di scritture dall’esilio,” in Presenza in Italia, 391–409. 5 In collaboration with scholars from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies (Innsbruck). 6 In her pioneering anthology of Jesuit Latin poetry, for example, the late Andrée Thill did not include works published after 1730, holding that “neo-Latin poetry in general and that of the Jesuits in particular […] entered a period of decadence after the golden age of the 17th century.” Andrée Thill and Gilles Banderier, La lyre jésuite: Anthologie de poèmes latins (1620–1730) (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 7. journal of jesuitDownloaded studies from Brill.com10/01/2021 3 (2016) 42-60 08:20:20PM via free access <UN> Suppressed Emotions 45 I venture, precisely by exploiting the genres and tropes of ancient literature, eighteenth-century Jesuit writers found the tools to express and manage their “modern” emotions with as much authenticity as, and perhaps even more pre- cision and subtlety than, when they wrote in the vernacular. In addition to letters, diaries, and histories, we find long Latin scientific poems, demonstrating Enlightenment values; highly affective devotional pieces; mournful elegies; satires; and nostalgic epics, celebrating a heroic past of missionaries and martyrs. Aside